The Carrier (16 page)

They drove along—dry corn fields and
telephone poles. They passed through a small strip of stores, dead
like a ghost town in the middle of the night. Cyril did a few
pointless loops and then headed back west along the corn fields
again. The brown Lexus was nowhere to be seen.

CHAPTER 27

The tracker had gone down for a few
minutes at a time before, but that hadn’t been a problem when they
were moving across the country. It had been out now for close to an
hour, and Danny was shaking the thing as he drove.

“
Come back to us, little
buddy. Come on back,” he coaxed.

“
Is the battery
dead?”

“
No, the battery is not
dead.”

“
Because if you don’t make
sure that you’ve got—”

“
Hey, Tesla, it’s not the
batteries.”

They came to a crossroads in the
middle of nowhere. Danny stopped the car and got out. He climbed
onto the roof and held the tracker as high as he could reach. When
that didn’t seem to work, Danny jogged to the side of the road and
climbed on top of a fence post. Again he held the tracker over his
head. Marcus climbed out of the car.

“
I don’t think—”

“
Would you shut up,” Danny
shouted. Then he hopped once, and again. The third time he lost his
footing and came down hard along the barbed wire. He ripped his
jacket open.

“
Are you all
right?”

Danny removed his jacket. The barbed
wire had ripped through his shirt as well as the jacket, but it had
stopped just short of his skin. He balled up the jacket and heaved
it to the side of the road. When he looked back at the tracker the
car was moving again.

CHAPTER 28

Cyril would have missed the turnoff if
Willow hadn’t seen it and poked him in the shoulder. They’d passed
a golf course and some upscale homes. The turnoff was a narrow dirt
path alongside wooded properties. They stopped just short. At four
in the morning there was nothing moving for miles. On the map, the
path came to a dead end. The only way in or out was this slender
lane.

“
So they’re penned in?”
Willow asked.

“
You could think of it that
way.”

“
Let’s go.”

“
I can’t take you in
there.”

“
Why not? You just say I’m
your partner.”

“
We can’t do
that.”

“
So I’m supposed to just
stand here on the side of the road? In the dark?”

“
You want me to drive you
back somewhere and try to find a twenty-four hour
diner?”

“
No. I want to go in there
with you.”

“
I’ve already been a little
unreliable. I missed three phone calls, remember? Then I show up
with a strange armed woman? What are they going to
think?”

“
I just want to be there
when they hand you the money.”

“
I told you it’s not
money.”

“
We’ll see.”

If he went in alone, Willow would lose
almost all her leverage.

“
How about this—I keep the
car, you walk in,” she said.

“
I can’t walk
in.”

“
Why not?”

“
They’ll want to know where
my damn car is.”

“
You tell them it’s parked
back up the road.”

“
Because I just wanted to
walk half a mile in the dark?”

Willow punched the back of Cyril’s
seat, hard.

“
Please. Trust me that I’ll
come back to you. And I’ll have a trunkful of heroin. We’ll take
off to a ski lodge or something.”

“
You think skiing is
stupid.”

“
I won’t ski: I’ll just hang
out in bars and sell junk by the bag.”

“
And you think it’ll get us
killed.”

“
Probably not. We do it
quiet—a little at a time. When we’ve sold it all we go to Belize.
By New Years we’ll be sitting in your beach house with a pile of
cash, eating crab with some real hip Mennonites. We’ll figure it
out from there.”

She wasn’t all the way sold, but she
wanted to be.

“
Willow. I don’t always feel
safe around you, but you do something to me that’s kind of crazy.
You get that, right?”

“
Yes.”

“
And we’re in this, you
know? So let’s do it.”

“
Okay,” Willow said
quietly.

“
The reason why I’m good at
what I do is because I’m normal, no surprises. I’ve got dealers who
tell Tony not to send anyone other than me, because I look like an
insurance salesman. Handovers are tense enough. I don’t want to
make it strange. You heard how the guy sounded just because I
missed a few phone calls?”

“
If you don’t come back, I
will find you.”

“
There’s nowhere else I can
go other than straight back here when I’m done. Then I pick you up
and we head for Colorado or wherever it is they keep the
snow.”

“
All right,” Willow nodded.
“I love you.”

“
I love you, too,” Cyril
said, and he kissed her, mashing her back against the passenger
window, on a quiet road in the very early hours of the morning in a
small Iowa town. She pushed back and then hopped on top of him,
sliding down her pants and fumbling with his belt. They pressed
together and came quickly, awkwardly.

“
That’s for good luck,” she
said.

She stepped out of the car, but—they
both knew—she still had the gun. He started the engine and drove
down the narrow path.

It was dark, but Willow was able to
see with the flashlight, and she could smell a faint rotting scent
from the woods. A few drops of rain came down, but they seemed a
little hesitant. It wasn’t about to pour. She was warm in her
sweatshirt and jacket, and for just a moment, she felt like a
teenager—overcome with love and adventure.

It was a nice moment, until she
thought about it and decided that Cyril was about to
die.

CHAPTER 29

Cyril was stopped at the head of the
driveway by a short muscular man straining with two dogs on a
leash. It was nothing Cyril hadn’t seen before, but he still hated
dogs, especially snarling pit bull mixes like these that kept
barking, like someone owed them a lot of meat.

“
Shut up. You will do what I
say,” the man screamed. “You’re going to do it now. Shut the hell
up. Now.”

“
Nice puppies,” Cyril
said.

“
Get out of your
car.”

Cyril got out. He saw another man
about twenty yards away holding an automatic rifle loose by his
side. There was also a platform in a tree on the west side of the
yard. There was someone up there, but it was hard to see if he was
armed. These guys were more serious about their defense than anyone
Cyril had ever visited before.

“
Hi, I’m Chub,” Cyril said
to the muscular man.

“
Supposed to be here a lot
sooner. We’ve got places to go. I’m going to pat you
down.”

“
Go ahead.”

The man gave Cyril a pretty thorough
check. Then he took a gun out of the back of his waistband, not
quite pointing it at Cyril. The dogs had calmed down.

“
You like coming out here at
four in the morning?”

“
I just go where Top tells
me.”

Cyril liked to drop Top’s name at some
point during a meet, but it didn’t seem to have made much of an
impression on this man. The voice on the phone had been gruff but
reasonable. This guy was dumb and weird. Cyril hoped the reasonable
one was inside waiting to make the deal. The man with the dogs
motioned toward the house, which was set back about a hundred yards
into the property.

“
Go on,” he said.

Cyril walked alone, but he could feel
the eyes watching him as he moved to the house. It was a handsome
red brick home, probably a really nice place for a family to live.
The door was open as he approached, and he saw a slim red headed
man.

“
You Chub?” he
asked.

“
That’s me.”

“
You didn’t bring a bag or
nothing?”

“
No.”

“
All right, come
in.”

The inside was nearly bare. A single
couch and flat screen TV sat in one end of the room, and a long
Formica counter stood at the other. In between was bare
tile.

“
You smell like something.
What have you been doing?”

Cyril shrugged.

“
I met you in Providence,
right?” the redhead asked.

“
I doubt it.”

“
Then why do I feel like I
know you?”

“
I have a familiar
look.”

The redhead thought about that a
moment.

“
You probably know we’re not
delighted with this arrangement.”

“
No one told me
that.”

“
We feel like we’re paying
for the mistakes of a lot of little ducklings that have nothing to
do with us. Jay really takes a bite, doesn’t he?”

“
Who’s Jay?”

Why even ask? Just nod, take the
money, and go home. Why worry about someone named Jay?

“
Who’s Jay?” the redhead
asked. “How can you not know who Jay is? How do I even know who you
are?”

Jay, was that Top’s name? Maybe people
who didn’t work for him directly didn’t call him Top; that was just
military slang, gay slang, mid-sized opium trade slang.

“
I think we call him Top,”
Cyril said.

“
Top? Maybe I should get Jay
on the phone right now. If you don’t look exactly like he says you
should, I put a bullet in your head.”

So much for this guy being reasonable.
There were at least two guns on the man. Cyril wasn’t going to make
it off the property if anything rough went down.

“
If you call him, make sure
he knows it was your idea. He probably doesn’t want to be woken up
at five in the morning,” Cyril said.

“
Some things are
important.”

“
Sure, but either way he’s
going to think you’re an idiot.”

“
What do you mean—either
way?”

“
If I’m Chub—and I am—then
Top’s going to be pissed at you for wasting his time. If I’m some
weird drifter who wandered into your compound, then you look even
worse, don’t you?”

“
Let me see some
ID.”

“
You think it’s going to
say
Chub
on my
driver’s license?”

“
I don’t know what it’s
going to say. Let me see.”

“
I never bring my wallet in
with me.”

This whole meet was messed up—twitchy,
unfamiliar people in a fortified compound who didn’t trust him.
Clearly the groundwork hadn’t been laid.

“
Maybe I should have just
said I remembered you from Providence, right?” Cyril
said.

“
Yeah, then you’d be playing
with the dogs right now.”

“
Those are
yours?”

“
No, I don’t go near
them.”

The redhead took out his phone and
called Cyril’s number. Nothing rang.

“
Where’s your phone, man?”
the redhead asked.

“
It’s back in the car. I
really didn’t think I’d need it in here.”

He hoped Willow would be
smart enough not to pick up. The phone went to
voicemail—
good job, sweetheart.

“
What’s your phone
number?”

“
I don’t know. I never
called it.”

“
And you were sleeping all
those times I called before?”

“
Look, it’s up to you. You
don’t have to believe I’m Chub. I can leave, you can shoot me and
bury me out back, or we can do what we’re supposed to do. What do
you say?”

“
I’d like it if you were a
little fatter. Or a little slimmer. Either way. God damned
50
^th
percentile is what you are.”

The redhead didn’t like how loose the
setup was any more than Cyril did, but he also wasn’t up to defying
Top. He just wanted to feel a little safer.

“
Tell me someone else you
know,” he said. “Give me a name.”

The first name Cyril could think of
was the worthless man himself.

“
Tony Braxton.”

It was probably the last time Tony
would do something useful. The redhead seemed a little more at
ease.

“
Good guy,” he said. “I
mean, all things considered, one of the decent ones. He served with
my brother. Afghanistan. The first time I ever used Skype, my
brother is talking to me and my mom and dad, all earnest, then all
of a sudden this guy just comes on screen and moons us—like
aggressive werewolf mooning.”

“
Tony?”

The redhead nodded and
shrugged.